Peppers Started!

The gardening season has begun!

Today I planted all of my peppers. This year I have 8 different varieties all of them sweet peppers.  I planted Alma Paprika(18), King of the North(29), Jimmy Nardallo(21), Sweet Chocolate(18), Purple Beauty(18), Medusa(15), Sweet Hungarian Banana(18) and Golden Cal Wonder(4).     I ended up planting 141 seeds; the amount planted of each is in brackets above.   I planted roughly 3X more than I need because last year I had over half my seeds not germinate.

They are germinating in the basement room under a 4 foot shop light with cool white bulbs.  The room is around 70-80F it’s only heated by a couple light bulbs and then whenever the furnace comes on.  I am also turning on a heater a couple times a day to give them a little extra heat. Last year I didn’t have the extra heat and the basement was more around 60-70F and that could have been a contributing factor.

They were all planted in individual cells in regular potting soil. The calls are also covered with a hard plastic shell to retain moisture and help keep the temperature up. They soil is pretty moist and I think in a few cells it is a little too wet but we will see.  Overall I am pretty hopefully for them and excited to see when they start to come up!

Kentucky Wonder Wax

To go along with my green pole beans I also bought these Wonder Wax yellow beans.  These are from the McKenzie seed company and grew exactly like the green beans.  They were a few days earlier maturing but that was about the only difference.  

They were not however fully yellow beans.  Most of them were tinged green or had part of the bean green part yellow but in no apparent order or sequence.  This was defiantly a turn off as they weren’t very astatically pleasing.  The flavor was ok nothing outstanding       and they did like the green beans become very meaty if left on the vine too long.

This is a bean that I don’t think I would grow again.  It wasn’t terrible but didn’t really meet the expectations I had for it compared to the Kentucky wonder green.

Kentucky Wonder Green Beans

This is the first year I have grown pole beans. I wanted to try out more vegetables that I could trellis and grow vertically.  The seeds were bought from OSC and came with this description

“A strong, hardy and vigorous climber that is a prolific producer of round, meaty pods 18-20cm (7-8") long. A tried and true variety producing top quality green beans with a distinctive pleasing taste.”

I did have a little trouble when they germinated because of some heavy rain that washed away the soil covering them.  But they still germinated above ground and set down roots. The packaging said that they will grow >70cm, that was a significant understatement.  The trellis its self was 6’ and the poles on either end were 10’.  The plants went up one side and down the other with a number of plants that went up the poles and started to grow into the tree.  The plants were very hardy and were able to withstand the light frost.

The beans themselves were plentiful. Once they reached about 6’’ they were ideal for picking.  Much larger than that and I found they because very meaty and not as tender as they should be.  They grew in clusters of 4 beans all together that made it easy to pick as long as you could find them amongst the tangled mass of vines.

They were grown on 6’x 12’ plastic netting.  It worked ok, but the weight of the vines made the middle sag about a foot.  As well at the end of the season it is almost impossible to pull the vines out of the netting.  They were so intertwined I left them there and will just use as is this year.

I would defiantly grow these beans again. The next time i grow these the trellis will be taller and use different materials.  I do have some different ideas for this year that I am still working on.

A Varietal Report

I saw this on the Seasonal Ontario Food blog and found it incredibly helpful.  When I was looking at potential varieties of vegetables to grow I was able to read all of that first hand information off of her reports and to help me decide what would work well where I am located.  So I have decided that I will write a varietal report on the vegetables I grow, so that in future years when I can’t remember I can just look back at these notes.  Did I like it, how did it turn out, where was it planted etc.

It will defiantly be better than what I am doing now, which is nothing.  In fact I have already found my blog to be incredibly helpful as I looked back to check out some garlic information and it was already right there in an old post.

Seed Ordering

So although it is the middle of winter I have already ordered seeds for this spring.  Last year I just bought seeds from a number of different greenhouses and stores that I passed by.  This year I wanted to try out a few new specific plants, so I ordered seeds from the Cottage Gardener, Hawthorn Farm and Mandy’s Greenhouse.  I am also going to be buying the remaining seeds I need from OSC and McKenzie Seeds.  As well as anything else interesting that I find and can’t resist.

I ordered from Mandy's last week and I know she received my order because she ran out of one item and called me so I could choose a substitute.  On Tuesday I ordered from Cottage Gardener and Hawthorn Farm and today they arrived.  I am pretty impressed that it only took 3 days to get my seeds.

From the Cottage Gardener I ordered alma paprika, jimmy nardello, chocolate and king of the north peppers. I also ordered atomic red carrots, black prince tomatoes.  For lettuce I chose paris cos romaine and Queen of Ices.  I also picked out sweet Siberian, golden midget and small shining light watermelon.  From the outside of the packaging it has your basic info about the seeds everything that I expected.  The seed count seems to be on par with what it says, some do seem kind of skimpy but 50 pepper seeds do not take up that much room so it is hard to tell.

From Hawthorn Farm I ordered tongue of fire, northeastern and true red cranberry beans, mammoth melting snow peas and blue pod capucijners. I also got polish linguisa and black cherry tomatoes and purple beauty peppers. They are well packaged with good information on them.  I especially like that they had the germination % on them.  The packages seem to be nice and full although most of these seeds are significantly larger.  Until you open packages it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re getting.

I just have to wait for my order from mandy and then a few packages of various other vegetables that I would like to get.

Root Crops and Hardy Greens

Today I finished harvesting the rest of my carrots.  All that was left were the purple carrots from my box and they turned out to be the best carrots I have harvested this fall.  They were all a nice large size; there wasn’t any insect damage or cracks.  Next year I am planning on growing most if not all of my carrots at home in boxes.

I have harvested a few parsnips so far and they have been huge.  I am digging them as we eat them and probably will continue to do it that way.  There aren’t tons and that’s where they will be the safest.  There are some mice in the basement that have nibbles on a potato or 2 and I see no reason to give them anything else to eat.  The cats do make sure they only appear every so often but still.

Something I also learned after the 5 inches of snow we got yesterday is that bok choy and kale are both winter hardy.  The kale looks perfect and is going to be coming out of the garden next week.   The bok choy went to seed a couple weeks ago and I have been using some of the leaves, but pulled the remaining plants today.  There are a couple that I brought inside to use this week but the rest are compost.

Mulching Garlic and Asparagus

Last week on Nov 12^th, I finally finished the garlic bed for the year and mulched it.  I used the mulched leaves that I gathered a couple weeks ago from the cottage.  They were a mixture of maple ash and poplar leaves.   I spread the leaves loosely over the garlic at approximately 2-4 inches deep.  I used shredded leaves so that when the garlic sprouts it will be able to push through them.  If the leaves were whole the garlic would have more trouble pushing through them. 

I also dug up around one clove that I planted a month ago to see how it was doing.  Although it didn’t have a sprout on top of the clove, it did have roots!  Now I didn’t dig up the whole clove just the side of it so I could see it and then rebury. 

I also mulched the asparagus.  For this I used whole leaves and spread it around 4 inches deep.  I spread it thickly all around the plants with a little right on top.  I'm not as worried that the asparagus will have trouble coming up through the leaves.  It is a pretty hardy plant.